A Thorn Among the Lilies (9 page)

C
HAPTER
13

I
am pretty used to answering the phone at my house on account of nine times out of ten? It's for me. And nine times out of nine, it's Dewey calling to see what I'm up to or to ask me some weird question about nuclear physics or something that he really has no interest or understanding of, but only wants to sound smart.

So when the phone rang this afternoon, I got up from where I was sitting on the floor by Carry's feet—she was taking up the entire sofa and we were watching
The Partridge Family,
a show
she
picked—and ran to answer it.

I was quite surprised by the response on the other end after I said hello.

“Is Carry home?”

It was a boy's voice. He sounded a bit nervous. Boys never called our house for Carry, so I wasn't about to let this one go by unnoticed. It was just too bad my mother hadn't been home; then I could've really worked her over with it. “Oh, Carry!” I called out to the living room. “Phone's for you! It's a booooy.”

She was at that phone faster than any deer you've ever seen in any forest. I couldn't believe the speed with which she leaped off that sofa. She was just a blur.

“Hello?” she asked anxiously.

“Oh, hi, Jonathon. Nice to see you—er,
hear
—you again. Can you hang on for one sec?”

She covered up the receiver on the phone, and said to me, “Can you get out of this room and give me some privacy, ass face? Or I swear to God, I'll kill you when this call is over.”

I had never seen Carry so serious in my entire life. I decided to heed her warning. Carry could have a rough side, and I'd rather not be attacked by a fifteen-year-old tiger high-school student when her call was over. Some things just weren't worth the pain they caused. This one was close, but still, in the end, I decided to leave her alone.

She was talking pretty loud, though. I could tell she was excited. So I turned the TV down about halfway and heard most of Carry's side of the conversation anyway. “Sure, I'd love to go for a walk,” she said. “No, I can leave right now. My mom won't care.” And then, “Yeah, we can meet where we had the pizza catastrophe.”

What the heck was a “pizza catastrophe”? I wondered.

“Okay, see you in about twenty minutes,” she said, and hung up the phone.

“Who's Jonathon?” I asked while Carry put on her boots.

“None of your business, ass face.”

“Where did you meet him?”

She lifted her eyes to me. “Again, none of your business.”

“How old is he? Mom's gonna ask me and I'm gonna say he sounded about twenty-two because I reckon that's how old he sounded on the phone.”

She exhaled deeply. “He's seventeen. You better not say anythin' to Mom 'bout this.”

“She's gonna ask where you are.”

“I'm gonna leave her a note sayin' I went for a walk with a friend. Which is the God's honest truth.”

She struggled into her winter coat. “What's a ‘pizza catastrophe'?” I asked.

“Did you eavesdrop on my
entire
conversation? You really
are
an ass face.”

She tore a piece of paper out of her pad of artwork paper that was still sitting in the kitchen by the phone and quickly wrote our mother a letter:

 

 

“Make sure Mom sees that, okay? And no adding any embellishments to it, or I will seriously kill you.”

“Okay,” I said. I thought it sounded like a good trade: my life for not embellishing.

Then she left out the back door, practically skipping as she went.

The first thing I did was call Dewey. “Guess what?” I said.

“What?”

“Madame Crystalle's not a fraud.”

“What do you mean?”

“A boy just called here for Carry. She's gone to meet him for a walk,” I said.

“No way.”

“Way.”

“Holy cow. This changes everything.”

Now he had me worried. “What does it change, Dewey?”

“It means I can develop
real
psychic powers.”

“No, it don't. You ain't Persian.”

“I don't think you have to be.”

“Well, you ain't smart neither.”

“We'll see. I gotta go. Been studyin' my cards like crazy.”

He hung up and all I could think was that I just hoped this boyfriend turned out better than the last time Carry got herself one.

 

Jonathon was waiting on the exact spot they had their squashed pizza lunch when Carry made it down Hunter Road to meet him. She had spotted his red hair from nearly a block away. “Sorry I'm late,” she said. “I had to threaten my little brother with his life because he's such a tool.”

“What do you mean?” Jonathon said, laughing.

“He threatened to tell my mother he didn't know how old you were but when he answered the phone you sounded twenty-two.”

“That's hilarious. He sounds like a pretty smart kid.” Jonathon was wearing a brown bomber jacket. And he had on denim jeans that were nice and tight, along with a pair of Converses that looked like they'd gone through enough hikes in their life that it was time to put them down and out of their miseries.

“That's smart to you?” Carry asked. “That's the dumbest thing in the world. He'd have to get all his teeth replaced after I hit him with the baseball bat.” Carry noticed most of the pizza mess was gone, but there was still a faded stain there. It looked sort of like the blood splatter and other evidence still present from a murder scene after it had been cleaned up. “So what do you wanna do?”

“I thought we were gonna go for a walk,” Jonathon said. He looked like he was dressed very warmly this time, with his jacket and all. The jacket made him look especially scrumptious, Carry thought.

“Okay, where to?” she asked.

“I was thinking there's some nice trails down around Bullfrog Creek, or we could go up to Cloverdale.”

“Bullfrog Creek sounds nice. As long as we stay away from Skeeter Swamp.”

“Why's that?”

“Do you remember the murdered fourteen-year-old girl last year who turned up beneath a willow beside that swamp?”

“The Cornstalk Killer stuff?”

“Yeah, well, my mom worked the case. I still get nightmares from it.”

“Oh. Are you sure Bullfrog Creek's okay, then? It's awfully close to Skeeter Swamp.”

“Oh, it should be fine. As long as I don't see that willow tree that body was left left under.”

“Okay.”

They began walking down Hunter Road and not five minutes had gone by before Jonathon reached down and took Carry's hand, interlacing his fingers with hers. She felt her heart start to pound against her ribs. “I wonder what my mom would say if she knew I was going for a walk in the woods with a strange boy I don't really know. She
is
a police officer, you know.”

“Probably somethin' like, I hope he's not a serial killer,” Jonathon said. But the way he said it put Carry slightly on edge. There was no laughter behind it. It was almost like he wasn't kidding.

C
HAPTER
14

L
eah returned to the crime scene, not really expecting to find anything new—it was just something in her gut that pulled her that way. It was late afternoon and the park was pretty empty. She walked along the wharf they had found Mercy Jo's body beneath and talked to herself as she did. She realized quickly what she was really trying to do was put herself in Mercy's shoes or even the murderer's. Try and figure out how it felt to be either of them. It was much easier pretending to be Mercy Jo than it was pretending to be the killer. Even adding in that Mercy went through such an ordeal, the thought of being a cold-blooded killer just made her shiver.

The police tape still cordoned off the site and she was forced to step under it in order to get in close to where the body had been. Her feet were in standard-issue police boots, but the rest of her clothes were civilian.

Despite knowing all the forensic evidence had already been nabbed, she was careful with the scene anyway. Some habits die hard.

First, she sat herself down in the sand and clay beside the wharf where the body was discovered in the shadow of the wooden pilings and slats. “So how did it go down? What did I, Mercy Jo, do differently that night than on
most
nights? What made him pick me?”

Leah stood and climbed out from under the wharf and walked along the top. The sun gently touched the water of the lake, dancing gently on its pallid surface in emerald greens and sapphire blues. The trees lining the park's edge (most of them evergreens) looked beautiful this time of year, but Leah couldn't shake the shiver she had running through her.

“So I got out of bed late and decided to head to the place where everybody knows my name. Fair enough. Life throws me curve balls that are actually lemons, so I make martinis out of them. Only on this night I maybe make a few more than usual. Makes me an easy target.

“Guy walks into the Six-Gun Saloon and spots me, obviously alone. Maybe I'm a bit melancholy, a little maudlin. Guy muscles up to where I'm sitting and throws me some pathetic line like, ‘Hey beautiful, what's a nice broad like you doin' sittin' in a place like this all by yourself? Let me buy you a drink.' And of course, I do, because that's what I've always done.

“Only this drink is different. It looks like the rest of the ones I've had all night; it even tastes the same as the ones I've been drinking all night. But he's crushed some drugs into it to make sure I'll be completely out of it in the next twenty minutes.

“Twenty minutes later, he's helping me outside and into his car, telling anyone who happens to glance our way that I'm a featherweight drunk and he shoulda stopped me at three.”

Leah stopped and watched the sun sparkle in the water. The reflection off the lake was nothing short of breathtaking and the word filled her mind: breathtaking. Breath taking. That's what this man did to Mercy. He took her final breaths away.

“By now, I'm so out of it, I can't even fight him off. I don't even
know to
fight him off. So I get into his car and he drives me . . . where? To his house? No, that would be too chancy. He drives me somewhere else. Somewhere secluded, but not too far away. Some little hidey-hole away from home he's gonna stash me away somewhere around Alvin.”

Leah walked farther down the deck. “I occasionally come to my senses for brief moments, and in those moments, I'm scared. What does he want, sex? I get to wherever it is he's taking me and decide to give him whatever he wants so I can just leave and go home. But he doesn't want sex, and he certainly doesn't want me going home.”

Behind Leah, there's some screams. Startled, she turned to see a group of kids playing Frisbee in the afternoon's crystal sunlight. She continued her train of thoughts pretending she really was in Mercy's shoes that night.

“Instead, he ties my wrists and ankles very tightly and puts me somewhere in his home away from home. Likely, he leaves me left lying on my back with my wrists tied behind me. Then he brings out the unimaginable: the sewing kit. And, even though I may be drugged and drunk, it doesn't stop the pain as he carefully stitches both of my eyes closed. In fact, my screaming becomes too much for him and he slaps a piece of duct tape over my mouth to keep me quiet.”

Leah was growing more and more impatient with the clues she had to this case. They didn't add up. She sat down on the end of the wharf cross-legged and looked back toward the park where mothers were nursing babies, children were being pushed on swings, and the Frisbee game was still in full play. “It doesn't make any sense,” she said. “Why doesn't he want to have sex with me?”

The writing on the body, according to the medical examiner, likely came postmortem. But he didn't just let Mercy Jo die. He kept her alive for six or seven days on a constant diet of alcohol and roofies.

None of this case made any sense.

“Okay, now let's run it again from his point of view.”

“I walk into the bar that night and see Mercy Jo all by herself and think, ‘She should be pretty easy pickin's.' Only, I've been snubbed before, so when I ask her if she wants a drink and she says yes, on my way back from the bar I make sure this one works by crushing a roofie in it. I had the roofie in my hand all ready to go.”

Mercy Jo seems to like me. She doesn't put up any sort of fight. Nobody reports anything out of the ordinary or even remembers her leaving, even though she would've been completely out of it.

Or would she? Perhaps she left under her own volition before the alcohol and drugs hit. Perhaps she knew me. That would make sense. Then the drugs kicked in along the way to my hidey-hole.

After that, for you, it was all a blur.

C
HAPTER
15

C
arry and Jonathon continued their walk down Hunter Road until they came to the end of it. Then they followed the dirt trails leading into the woods that surrounded Bullfrog Creek. Most of these were walking trails, not nearly wide enough for a vehicle to drive down.

The rain from the night before had given the forest that dewy wet smell that almost made it feel like spring, if it weren't for the naked branches on everything but the evergreens.

Since thinking about what her mother's reaction would be to her walking in the woods with a strange boy, Carry began to question her own intuition. Had she made a terrible mistake agreeing to go on this walk? She really didn't know anything about Jonathon Mitchell other than that he worked at Raven Lee's Pizzeria. That is,
if
he still had a job there after missing two pizzas during his delivery and being a half hour late with the others.

“So what happened yesterday after I left? Did you get in major shit about the pizzas being a half hour late and cold and not havin' the missin' two you left with?”

“Of course,” he smiled. “But my grandpa owns Raven Lee's, his name actually
is
Raven Lee Emerson, so he wasn't so rough on me, especially when I told him I had a very good reason for being late.”

“And what reason did you tell him?” Carry asked.

“That I met the most fantastic girl who was nothin' like anyone else I'd ever run into in my life. My grandfather is a complete romantic. He believes in eternal and everlasting love. Him and my grandmother were together fifty-five years before she died last year of cancer. I thought for a while her death was going to take him with her. He became so sad. But he's sort of bounced back again now.”

“Wow. That's a long time to be together,” Carry said.

“My family comes from a history of romantics. We all should've been born in the early eighteen hundreds; we would've definitely fit in better. Nobody is romantic anymore. I think that's a shame, don't you?”

Carry had just been walking, listening to the cadence of his voice, and not really listening to the words. She'd been smelling the forest. Occasionally, she'd glance over at Jonathon's red hair, which looked very curious as they walked through the shadows of the trees. The sunlight would hit the top of Jonathon's head, almost making it look engulfed in flames, and then it would be bathed in darkness a few seconds later.

It took her a minute of silence before she realized he had asked her a question. Then she quickly tried to think back to what it was. She couldn't remember. “I'm sorry, I missed your question,” she said.

He laughed. “You're
already
ignorin' me and you don't even hardly
know
me yet. I asked you if you think the fall of romanticism is a shame? Because nobody is a true romantic anymore.”

“Definitely. I love romance.” The butterflies from the other day were back and they'd brought helium-filled balloons with them. It felt like they were fluttering in Carry's stomach and unleashing the helium, making her start to become buoyant, and soon she would just rise up into the sky and probably get trapped in one of the bare branches above their heads.

The bare branches came to an end about a half block later and they found themselves under a veil of evergreen boughs. Douglas fir and pine—those were the only two Carry knew for sure. A hard wind wound up and hit Carry and Jonathon in the back.

Carry shuddered. “It's getting cold.”

“Want my coat?” Jonathon asked.

“No, then you would freeze to death.”

“Better me than you.” He stopped walking, took off his coat, and handed it to Carry, who hesitantly put it on.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Sure.” Once again, his hand found hers as they headed farther into the woods. “You okay now?”

“Yes, I'm fine. But you look cold.”

“You look beautiful.”

Carry felt her face flush.

“How 'bout we walk well around Skeeter Swamp and head to Painted Lake? It's beautiful over there,” Jonathon said.

“Okay.” At this point Carry would get into a rocket and follow him to the moon and back.

The walk to Painted Lake took almost an hour, but time stopped meaning anything to Carry. She just kept looking at Jonathon, wondering how she got so lucky to actually “run into” such a fabulous guy.

Once they made it to the lake, they walked around it a bit until Carry said she better get going home because God only knew what her little brother actually told her mother about where she was going.

“When will I see you again?” Jonathon asked.

“When do you want to see me again?”

“The moment you walk away from me.”

Oh, this guy definitely knew how to say the right things. “How 'bout we go to a movie. There's that new comedy coming out. You know . . . I can't remember the name.”

“
Beetlejuice
?”

“Yeah, that's it. We could go on Tuesday or Wednesday. It would at least give me something to look forward to.”

They walked out of the woods by Painted Lake and found themselves at the Anikawa River. It was low and hardly moving. This was unusual. Normally the Anikawa is a dangerous river.

“There's a place to cross over here,” Jonathon said, and guided Carry to a footbridge that looked like it was made by fourth-grade students.

“Are you sure it's safe?” Carry asked.

“I use it all the time. It's safe.”

“I dunno.”

“You have trust issues, don't you?”

Carry thought this over. “If I do, I've never noticed before and definitely nobody's ever pointed them out to me.”

“Well, we all have
some
sort of trust issues. It's what keeps us alive. Your instincts are pretty good at tellin' you when to trust and when not to, but some people have trust instincts that are a bit wonky. I think yours are a bit wonky.”

“I'd have to check with my mother. She likes the family to go carolin'.”

“What?” Jonathon said. “What does that have to do with your trust issues?”

She laughed. “Sorry, I'm still back at the movie. Probably Monday would be better.”

“Ah, so we could celebrate the day after Christmas. I like that, too.”

“It gives me at least
some
thing to look forward to between Christmas and going back to school.”

“I noticed you changed the subject about your wonky trust issues,” Jonathon said.

“Oh, was it that obvious? I was hoping to slip it past you.”

“Why are you so messed up?” Jonathon asked.

“With what? How am I messed up?”

“With your trust issues,” Jonathon said.

“I'm not. I have normal trust issues like everyone else,” Carry said.

“You won't trust me,” Jonathon said. “Why not?”

“Okay,” Carry said. “Maybe they're a little messed up. After all, my mother's a cop. It makes you a little strange.”

“Well, it's time to take your strangeness away.”

“And how do you propose we do that?” Carry asked.

“By startin' to trust people you feel are trustable. People like
me,
for instance. Now, walk across the bridge.” He was standing two thirds of the way over already.

Carry decided to do as he said. She started walking across, took two steps, and made the mistake of looking down. “I'm scared,” she said.

“Oh, man, just be happy this isn't the spring or summer when the Anikawa looks like one of the entrances to hell. Come on, you're a third of the way across already. You can do it.”

She took two more steps and was halfway across. Then two more. Then two more and she'd made it. Jonathon quickly grabbed her and pulled her into a hug. “See? I
told
you you could do it. You have to face your fears; otherwise, they have too much power over you. Speaking of which, you're going to have to face your fear of the cold because I need my coat back.”

She slipped out of the brown bomber jacket and handed it to him. “Thanks for freezing to death and letting me use it.”

“No, you don't understand. I had an ulterior motive.”

“What's that?”

He held the jacket to his face and sniffed it. “Now it smells like you.” Then he put it on.

“Do I get another hug?” he asked.

“For certain,” Carry said.

This one lasted at least a minute. Any coldness Carry felt was quickly disappearing. No, that was one hug that would go with her all the way home.

She looked into his deep blue eyes. A warmth filled her from head to toe. She liked Jonathon Mitchell.

A lot.